Edinburgh Festival: Exhibit B, Playfair Library Hall - review

Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B is all about looking colonial history in the eye. The South African artist’s disturbing but powerful installation is based on the human zoos of the 19th century, where “savages” were displayed to be ogled like animals. The “exhibits” are all played by local performers, who stand emotionless, watching us.

The tableaux illustrate horrors of colonial rule, stories of exploitation — a man sitting with a basket of severed hands, a woman forced to boil the heads of her countrymen — but this is not torture porn; it is still, reflective, non-histrionic.

Gently beautiful music rises in the room but the singers’ heads sit on plinths like museum curiosities. It all provokes the most confusing, compelling emotions — beauty and disgust entwined. Modern parallels are drawn and contemporary questions raised, about immigration, otherness and objectification.

Most haunting is the recreation of an officer’s room in the Belgian Congo, where a woman is kept chained to the bed. She sits facing a mirror and her dead-eyed stare meets the viewer’s gaze in the glass. It’s a visceral reflex to look away but it’s the way Bailey makes us physically engage with these stories as people that makes this an important and provocative work.